Bookslut reviews Max Winter’s The Pictures

The Pictures is a worthwhile book of poetry because it knows how to please; its breathy moments of profundity are tempered by an evenly handled attention to the landscape of the imagination. Max Winter, also a poetry editor at the endlessly hip Fence, is generous in his willingness to make toy-like the reader’s experience while uncompromising in his specificity. I mean to say: you can read this book in lazy stretches while sitting with your in-laws chatting about the weather and what the dog is doing. You can also take this book to bed. Or smartly consider it in a library window nook. It is not a particularly devastating book (in terms of content or form), but it is satisfying and unassuming….

Winter’s project here is to translate to language what an eye experiences (and, of course, how the eye’s intake is always bleeding into the mind’s processing of an image — still or moving, static or dynamic, heartbreaking or bizarre). And this, I must tell you, is inherently fun to read….

Part of the charm of the sterile, straight labels for poems and sections is that Winter can play inside of the constraint. Once the reader comprehends the “rules” of the book, it is easy to daydream one’s way through the language. And, certainly, different readers will have different experiences. In some ways, the poems have the feel of digging through those forgotten, forsaken, abandoned photos you find at a resale or antique shop. You know — the weirdness of seeing someone’s personal life in images. At other moments, the experience is akin to describing a particularly strange event to someone not present: you rely on your command of words to conjure something that is outside of language.

When I said that the poems in this book were not particularly devastating, I didn’t mean to suggest that they don’t have some real, old-fashioned sadness. But that’s sort of the nature of games like “people-watching” and “what is that person’s greatest fear” and “why would that lady wear a wig like that in the summertime.” And that imaginative play with what we see in the world is the thing that Winter taps into. And any time a poet fiddles with the funny experience of peopling a page with words, light fun and gut-turning examination of existence will inevitably turn up.